I'm a writer and a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. I most recently worked as an analyst, and before that at Business Insider, where I co-created BI Intelligence, the company's market research service. I live in Paris with my beloved wife and daughter.

Everybody Chill Out: Tom Perkins Is Grandpa Simpson, Not Monty Burns

Famed billionaire Tom Perkins has compared anti-inequality rhetoric to Nazism. This is obviously wrong. It’s factually wrong. It’s disastrously wrong. It is infantile. It is also offensive. All true.

Tom Perkins is not just a billionaire, he is a co-founder of one of the most storied venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, he is a titan of American capitalism. And this makes his comments news, especially since he has doubled down on them. True, true.

But here’s the thing: Tom Perkins is a long-retired old man who has no active role in business or public life anymore. And that makes me want to say: let he who has never said anything stupid in a public forum cast the first stone.

Here’s why I’m writing about this. I don’t think I’m the only one who’s noticed that our media ecosystem has devolved into an endless cycle of outrage, where one person or group is held out to the community as an object of rebuke.

One of the most tragic parts of this phenomenon is that to merely point out that this is happening and deploring it is construed as defending the actions of the one being rebuked. Of course, that’s part of the problem.

History and myth tell us that scapegoating is a social phenomenon as old as society itself, and that we always partake of it. And history and myth tell us that we all enjoy a bit of scapegoating–until we ourselves are the scapegoat. And that any of us can be the scapegoat. It should be possible to say that scapegoating is wrong even when what the scapegoat did was wrong.

Yes, what Tom Perkins said was disastrously wrong. Yes, it’s newsworthy, because he’s a prominent figure. He’s also a human being like you who errs and makes mistakes. He’s not Monty Burns, he’s Grandpa Simpson. So let’s please move to the next round of outrage.

And if you construe this post as defending Tom Perkins or his views, I’m sorry for you.

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